More than 2,500 teachers are already using Teacher Tapp, which is building data on working habits.
Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Does it matter how often teachers go to the pub together, who they are in relationships with, or whether they do marking in the Easter holidays?

Such quirky details about the hidden lives of the people who educate our children could be dismissed as irrelevant. However, that would be a mistake, say the founders of a new app designed to capture a real-time picture of the habits and motivation of the workforce of nearly half a million. Prof Becky Allen and Laura McInerney, a Guardian columnist, are former teachers who believe that understanding more about teachers’ lives could be the key to keeping them in the profession for longer. That is why they got together with a physics teacher, Alex Weatherall, to develop an app that gets daily insights into what teachers are doing and how they are feeling.

They say their focus is to gather data that will help improve the profession. More than 2,500 teachers are already using Teacher Tapp with an ambition of 5,000 respondents and 1,000 questions by the end of its first year.

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Teacher Tapp provides a few simple daily questions that flash up as smartphone notifications, such as: how much sleep did you get last night, do you mark in front of the TV and even how much of your salary would you give up to get rid of the naughtiest child in your class? As well as daily summaries, every Monday teachers get a roundup of all the information gathered in the previous week and a tip to stimulate discussion with colleagues.

Unions and education research organisations regularly survey teacher opinion. What is different about Teacher Tapp, which is quick to use and funded by grants from the Gatsby Foundation and Nesta, is that it asks the same people questions over time, its founders say.

Unsurprisingly, the main findings are around workload and working patterns – something Allen believes isn’t being investigated thoroughly enough by education researchers.

“Teachers’ working weeks tend to be complex, with work happening during the day, over lunch, in the evenings and at weekends. So asking a teacher how many hours they worked last week isn’t likely to give a reliable answer,” she says.

There is unanimity, however, about long, fraught days, often starting at 6am and ending with marking in front of the televisionuntil 9.30 at night.

“Teaching is a unique profession because teachers do not have fixed hours of work like other employees,” Allen says. “Instead, we specify their ‘directed time’ – the maximum hours they can be in front of a class – and assume they will do whatever it takes to prepare for their classes.

“This is why we often hear teachers complain about ‘workload’, whereas in other industries ‘working hours’ is the way we describe the intensity of the job.”

And if there is a political message in the early Teacher Tapp findings, it is that radical change is needed to the way that workload is measured – especially at a time when concerns about teacher recruitment and retention are escalating.